"We had every reason to believe there were no solvers," Darcy replied. Darcy was a tall man with a stoop. "There's no sign of any industrialization. They're probably at a very low technological level."

Wilson turned on him. "That is unacceptable." He jabbed his finger at Darcy. "Your answer to me is unacceptable. Get on it."

Darcy shifted uncertainly from foot to foot, and then left. Wilson charged into the lab. Todd, who was short, and Hanning, who had a gut, were working there. The thing was in the isolation tank for crew suspected to have native contagions. It watched at them as they bustled around the small, cramped, sterile enclosure.

"Are we sure it's a solver?" Wilson snapped. "It doesn't look intelligent."

"When we came back in, it was trying to unlock the chamber door," Todd said without looking up.

"That doesn't mean it's a solver."

Todd looked at him. "It was taking a rational course of action to try to solve a problem. Therefore, it is a solver."

"By the same reasoning the process of evolution is itself a solver," Wilson retorted, "coming up with new ways to survive."

"Besides," Hanning said, "it was carrying these. Hunting and trapping tools. It's not just a solver. It's a builder."

"Fuck!" Wilson said.

Nobody spoke for a moment. "What do you want us to do?" Hanning asked.

"Dissect it," Wilson decided. "See if you can find anything we can use. Maybe we can radio something up to the colony ship, have them build a new germ or something."

Darcy entered the lab. They barely all fit. "What's happening?"

They ignored him. "We don't really have the equipment," Todd explained. "They'll need a sample."

"Then find another way," Wilson said. "We can't get back up and I won't have them land under these circumstances."

"Find another way for what?" Darcy asked.

"We're talking about the best way of exterminating these guys," Todd told him.

"We can get them to drop the equipment we need," Hanning said. "In a pod. That way we can synthesize a bioagent without putting the colony in danger."

"Okay," Wilson decided. "Do that. And while we're waiting for the equipment, take this one --" he tapped on the glass of the holding tank behind him -- "apart and see what makes him tick."

I wouldn't, they all heard.

The four men stared at one another, dumbfounded.

I really wouldn't, they heard again. The consequences would be horrible for you.

* * *

Yes, the thing in the holding tank told them. We are telepathic. If you kill me, my family will sense it and come to avenge me.

"It's lying," Wilson snapped. "It would already have called them by now."

"It isn't lying about being telepathic," Hanning replied. "It did speak to us."

"Did you report to the colony ship?" Wilson asked Darcy.

"It had just passed out of range," Darcy replied. "It will rise again in 36 hours."

Wilson knuckled his forehead. "Perhaps," Darcy went on, "we could share the biosphere with them--"

"Share?" Wilson shrieked. "They eat the same food as we do, they hunt, they build traps, and you want to share? This thing is telepathic, for Christ's sake -- God knows what it's already learned from us--"

Many useful things, the calm alien thought came. I cannot see all of your thoughts, but now I am catching glimpses of the things you fear I may know -- interchangeable parts, mass production, moveable type. Wilson made a strangled sound. Of course, we do not yet have a written language -- we do not have a language at all. But it is only an elaboration of the bestial sounds we imitate in hunting. The principles seem simple.

"We're screwed," Todd said.

"Listen," Hanning told them urgently. "I say, kill this one and take our chances when the rest show up. We can fire up the engines if they close in, and waste a bunch of them that way. After a few shots of that, we'll be out of fuel, but they'll be afraid of us--"

"No," Darcy said. "They'll know. They can read minds."

"Worst possible solution," Todd told them. "We pre-record a message, set it on repeat, kill fink-boy here, and then waste ourselves. That way they can't read our minds and the colony ship comes in prepared."

"Yes," Wilson said, "that solution is the worst possible."

"But how do we know that he hasn't already transmitted the information to the others?" Hanning asked. "They might already know everything it knows, in which case, we'd be killing ourselves for nothing."

"I honestly think we're getting ahead of ourselves," Darcy said. "It seems perfectly possible to establish a colony without exterminating the local species."

"Listen," Wilson said. "We will be competing for the same food. Once we establish a culture based on agriculture, we will be altering this environment in ways that make it impossible for them to survive. The land will be used up. They will start to go hungry. What do you think a number of hungry savage aliens will do to local farmsteads?"

Darcy did not answer.

"This planet is ours. We need it. We have nowhere else to go. If we had known that a local solver species lived here sooner, we could have selected another system, and we wouldn't have these problems. But now the colony ship is out of fuel, just like our little lander is, and we have no choice."

"We could leave some of the land for them, or teach them to live in an industrial society--"

"Why? So they can understand our technology well enough to use it against us? So we can give them time to grow strong enough to wipe us out? Do you think they wouldn't try to wipe us out, after seeing how quickly our population grows, as we expand to acquire new farm land, clearing forest, draining fields, damming rivers? Do you have any idea how much larger a population we can support with our technology than they can support with theirs?

"Darcy, it's only a matter of time before they see us as a threat. And we are a threat. There is no way they can compete with us, and there is no way they can assimilate into us."

"It seems to me--" Darcy began, but Hanning interrupted him.

"They can't assimilate because they can't interbreed," Hanning told him. "There is no way for us to form blood bonds with them. Especially since there would be no balance of power, we would either end up enslaving them, or rounding them up into death camps. I'm sentimental: I think both those options suck. They're shameful. It's better to wage an all-out war."

"Why don't we just include them in our culture?"

"How?" Wilson demanded. "Train them in human occupations? Cultures run so deep that I doubt any of them over puberty could be trained. And then the younger ones are taken away from their families into a hostile environment where nobody really likes them. Identity conflicts like that can turn ugly. And you know -- you know -- that we would have to kill the older ones. Some of them will kill some of us. How do you think we'll treat the younger ones?"

"What you're describing are just the old racial problems that we went through on Earth," Darcy said. "That doesn't mean we have to kill them. It certainly doesn't mean we have the right to kill them--"

"But we can't interbreed," Hanning told Darcy. "The racial problems were only solved on Earth as the races formed blood bonds with one another--"

"That's not true," Todd said. "Often women of the slave castes would bear children of master caste men. The reverse was tabu, of course. That's called the sexualization of slavery. It actually became a primary motive for many caste systems."

"And for that reason," Hanning said, "slavery would not work here."

Nobody said anything. Hanning continued, "The fact is, they're not human. Within caste systems, people would invent ways to devalue or de-humanize the lesser castes. But in this case, they really aren't human. We can't expect to relate to them, understand them, or interact with them in any meaningful way. They're just animals that happen to be intelligent enough to pose a real threat. Just because a lion becomes intelligent enough to talk to, does not mean that you let it out of its cage."

"But we may be able to negotiate with them," Darcy said. "And any culture eventually needs to put limits on how it uses the environmental resources. We can do it sooner. There's no need for us to expand so quickly that we destroy their culture--"

Wilson said, "If we don't expand quickly, we will simply make it easier for them to crush us when they get around to seeing what a threat we are. Listen, evolution does not permit two competing species to fill the same niche -- "

"But he's saying that competing species don't sit down and plan out how they want to divide up the environmental resources," Todd said.

"Besides," Darcy said, "if we go to war with them, we might not win. There are far more of them than there are of us."

"But they don't have any centralized organization," Wilson said. "Almost certainly. They would go to war with us tribe by tribe, without any comprehension of our weapons of mass destruction. Also without any strategy. Strategy only appears when warfare becomes a means of conquest and control, under the large, well-organized societies formed by agriculture. That's true of humanity and a dozen other species."

"Todd," Darcy said, "do you see how terrible this all is? Do you see it?"

"We all see how terrible it is, Darcy," Hanning replied. "None of us want to destroy these poor dumb savages. But we also see how necessary it is. You don't, but the fact that you imagine that it could work out some other way does not mean that we could actually make it work."

"Maybe if we just keep a small number alive, with tight control over its population--" Darcy began.

"The fact is that nobody here is in any position to make any decisions," Todd said. "We report it to the colony ship and they make the decision. Probably, the decision will be to wipe them out. But it has nothing to do with us."

"Right," said Wilson.

May I make a suggestion? the thing in the holding tank inquired.

"Sure," Wilson said. "Why not?"

My people will understand that you pose a threat to them, but that will not necessarily motivate them to try to exterminate you. In our land, attempting to confront a threat often leads to your own demise. But we would not be willing to permit you to steal our land, either--

"We could have the colony ship land on another continent," Darcy suddenly suggested.

"And then how are you going to get home?" Wilson demanded. "Swim?" He eyed Darcy, and then turned back to the creature. "Continue."

Any intelligent species certainly wants to avoid war. And where intelligent negotiation is possible, ways can be found to avoid war. My people have an excellent tradition which ensures the mutual trust of two hostile parties.

"I've got to hear this," Hanning muttered. Wilson made a viscous chopping motion with his hand. Hanning got up and left the room.

It is simple and elegant. We exchange hostages. It is understood that, during any outbreak of aggression or betrayal of territory, the hostages will be tortured.

The three men considered this. "That might work," Wilson said.

Todd shook his head. "Can't do it," he said.

"Why not?"

Todd motioned. "They're telepathic. They would be able to get too much information out of our people."

Wilson thought about it. "Well, if we were to try to coexist with them, we would want them minimally adapted to our civilization -- just to the point where they could subsist on the periphery, not hungry enough to become dangerous, not assimilated enough to have any real power."

"We're really not equipped to wage war," Darcy said.

We are, the alien stated.

Hanning returned to the lab. "Okay, it's lying about being able to contact its tribe. I just went to the cockpit, which is only a few meters away, and I could barely hear it thinking. There's no way it could reach any habitation, because no habitations are near here."

True, it said, or I would have called them to my assistance already. However, if you kill me, I will cry out in a fashion that will be heard by my family, especially my sibling's second child, who is especially attuned to my manner of thought, and they will come looking for me.

"We could chloroform it and then kill it," Todd said. "Or see if we could surgically isolate and destroy the lobe in its brain that allows it to transmit thoughts. That might come in useful later."

"In any case, we do nothing until we have informed the colony ship and gotten our instructions. Are there any questions?"

There were none. They all returned to work. Hanning collected some preliminary data about the creature's cellular structure. Todd scanned it a number of different ways and began recording its gross physiology. Darcy began adjusting his ecosystem data to predict the likely distribution of the solver population. Wilson returned to the command module and began writing his report.

That night, Darcy snuck into the lab. "I'm sorry about this," he whispered to the creature. "I just don't think they'll accept any kind of compromise. Tell your people that you need to make an immediate show of force that convinces us that you can defend yourselves. Don't accept any compromises that don't include ways to allow you to enforce them, because otherwise we will lie to you. So you have to be willing to go back to war, even after you have negotiated a peace."

Darcy unlocked the door to the cage and the alien moved out into the lab. Thank you, it thought. I appreciate your counsel.

Darcy nodded, handing the thing its belt and hunting tools. "Most important, you have to find a way to communicate with one another reliably across wide distances, because we have and can build things that carry us quickly, for long periods."

Thank you, the creature repeated. Now please get into the holding tank.

"What?"

Please enter the holding tank. I will kill the others as they sleep, and then smash your machines so that the others in this colony ship remain unaware of our presence; but you I will bring back to my family and the other families, so they understand the magnitude of the threat your people pose. If we act very quickly, we may manage to exterminate your people within the first year, before they have time to become established.

"But-- but--"

I am afraid that we have no real choice. We can not rely on your species to make decisions that are beneficial to us. Enter the tank. Now.

Darcy screamed and lunged at the creature. It easily seized him with one hand, whipped a tool from its belt and slashed him across the throat. Darcy's battle cry ended in a single red moment, as he himself, falling to the floor of the lab, ended a moment later.

The alien creature stood in the center of the lab, immobile, listening with every fiber of its being to determine whether the other humans had woken up, or still slept; whether it should kill them immediately, or run for help.

the end